Known for a haute-bohemian sensibility informed by her travels and an eye for distinctive design, Muriel approaches decorating intuitively and has little patience for obsessing or second-guessing. "I don't overthink what I'm doing," she insists. *I just do it, and it works." Acutely sensitive to color, the designer who enlisted Paris decorator and close friend Caroline Sarkozy to help oversee the project, opted for an atypically subdued and soothing palette. "The painter was so excited to hand-mix the colors with me," she says. "He told me, Madame, it's wonderful! You work in the old-fashioned way!”

Another of Muriel's passions is fabric. Here she designed the textiles for the walls throughout the apartment. She also commissioned Jean-François Lesage to hand-embroider pillows and the pelmets that crown the living room's floor-to-ceiling French doors. Over the years, she has amassed a vast collection of vintage fabrics, around a dozen of which now clad a pair of slipper chairs in the living room. Slipper chairs are a signature of Muriel's, and after picking these up at a flea market, she had them covered in a dizzying patchwork of panels, including an obi she found in Kyoto and a fabric made with silver thread. "It's so beautiful, isn't it? " she enthuses. "It's beyond haute couture!”